cxciv Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



than in the earlier English work, his position as the advocate of that 

 monism which "regards subjectivity and objectivity as two inseparable 

 features of reality, consciousness being a complex form of sub- 

 jectivity." 



It is our purpose here to enter into neither an exposition nor a 

 discussion of these philosophical theories, but rather to note certain 

 points of physiological interest. 



Chapter V, " Pleasure and Pain," has been re- written for this 

 work. It is first remarked that moralists almost universally regard 

 pleasure as an end in itself, as if the existence of feeling had no other 

 purpose than the production of as little suffering and as much pleasure 

 as possible. This proposition has never been proven. It has been very 

 sagely treated as axiomatic. There was a time when the immobility 

 of the earth was also regarded as an axiom. Pleasure and pain are 

 in certain respects very inferior to the other psychic states. Neither 

 pleasure nor pain possesses any representative value. They are sim- 

 ply subjective states, which contain no information as to the objective 

 world. Thus they lack that element which alone can give dignity to 

 mental phenomena. They are psychic in that they are states of feel- 

 ing, but they are not mental ; they are not symbols, they have no 

 content ; they are not parts or qualities of the human intellect. Pleas- 

 ure is certainly not the end of man. The man who has attained the 

 highest intellectual development subordinates the sensibilities to the 

 service of the intellect. That familiar law of Dr. Bain's which iden- 

 tifies pleasure with an augmentation and pain with a dimunition of 

 the vital functions and which figures so prominently in almost all of 

 the text-books ancient and modern is dismissed on the ground that it 

 is not sustained by the facts. Moreover the decay of the vital func- 

 tions involves a dimished sensibility both to pleasure and pain. Suf- 

 fering is always caused by a disorder, pleasure by the satisfaction of a 

 need. Pleasure and pain are not opposites like cold and heat. They 

 do not differ only in degree, but they are disparate. 



Pleasure is falsely considered as active and pain as passive ; 

 neither is the activity of the flexors a proper characteristic of pain. 

 Some pains are salutary and some pleasures are baleful. Pleasure 

 and pain are inevitable, in that life consists of growth. Each advance 

 causes some disorders which have to be repaired. Mr. Spencer's 

 state of perfect harmony is an impossible dream, at least unless the 

 great river of life is dammed up into a stagnant lake. 



In the chapter on the birth of consciousness we are first reminded 

 that, as a single feeling cannot alone call forth a true state of con- 



